SHEET WY-01 · FORMATION DOSSIER

Wyoming

Form an LLC in Wyoming as a non-resident: the verified state fee, the license tax that follows you every year, the agent rule, and the traps that are specific to this state — each figure sourced on this sheet.

State formation fee: $100
Total with first-year membership: $499
Annual duty cost: $60/yr
Report pattern: The 1st of the anniversary month each year — the license tax is the greater of $60 or $0.0002 × the value of the LLC's assets located in Wyoming

On fee alone, Wyoming is the 27th cheapest of the 51 jurisdictions in this Atlas to form in. Fee is the smallest part of the decision — the duty below is the part that repeats.

What it takes here

You form a Wyoming LLC by filing Articles of Organization with the Wyoming Secretary of State. The state fee is $100, collected by us at cost as a pass-through — the state keeps its fee; our $399 first-year membership is separate and labelled as ours on the pricing page. Wyoming is the state that invented the LLC form in 1977, and its statute is written for exactly the founder this Atlas serves: nothing in the formation filing asks where you live, whether you hold a US tax number, or whether you have ever set foot in the state. A non-resident forms on the same form, at the same fee, as a rancher in Casper. What Wyoming does ask for — on every filing, without exception — is a registered agent with a physical address inside Wyoming, which is why the agent section below is not a formality on this sheet.

Name rules

Your company name must contain a limited-liability designator — “Limited Liability Company” or an accepted abbreviation such as “LLC” — and must be distinguishable from names already on the records of the Wyoming Secretary of State. A name that implies a regulated activity (banking, insurance, trust) or a government affiliation invites rejection or a consent requirement in Wyoming as in most states. For a non-resident there is a second, quieter naming point: the name on the Articles of Organization is the name the IRS will print on your EIN confirmation (the CP 575), and it is the name your bank and payment processors will match against your documents. Pick the final name before filing; amending it later is a second state filing with a second fee.

Publication

Wyoming imposes no newspaper-publication requirement on a new LLC. The publication duty that founders read about belongs to a small set of states — New York, Arizona and Nebraska are the ones in this Atlas — and it does not travel with you if you form here.

Forms, office and processing

The filing office is the Wyoming Secretary of State, Business Division, in Cheyenne. The formation document is the Articles of Organization, and Wyoming's articles are among the shortest in this Atlas: the state asks for the company's name, its registered agent and office, and the organizer who files — it does not ask you to publish your members or managers on the public record at formation. This sheet prints no day-count for Wyoming: the Secretary of State publishes no standard processing time we can quote to you as a promise, so we do not invent one. What we commit to in writing, before anything is filed, is the fee, the duty and the due pattern on this sheet.

The foreign-registration warning

Forming in Wyoming does not licence you to operate everywhere. If your LLC will have an office, employees, inventory or a sustained physical presence in another state, that state will generally require foreign qualification there — a second registration, a second agent and a second set of duties, on top of this one. Non-residents most often trip on this by forming in a low-fee state while living-adjacent operations, warehousing or staff sit somewhere else. Wyoming's low carrying cost is real, but it is the cost of the shell, not of the business: the state of formation should follow the business, not the other way round, and the diagnostic on this site asks where your customers and operations are for exactly this reason.

Your registered agent in Wyoming

Wyoming requires every LLC to keep a registered agent with a physical street address in Wyoming, continuously, for the life of the entity. This is not optional and it is not a mailing address: the agent is the person the state and any process server can find at that address during business hours. A founder who lives abroad cannot be their own Wyoming agent — you have no Wyoming street address to give — so for a non-resident the agent is a service you buy, and keeping it in place is what keeps the LLC in good standing between annual reports.

Membership includes the registered agent for year one. Renewal is $399 a year — the same membership price on every sheet in this Atlas — and it buys three things: the registered-agent renewal, the annual state filing service, and the compliance calendar. State fees and duties themselves stay pass-through at cost. Cancelling stops those services; it does not dissolve your LLC. If you move the agent elsewhere, the duty calendar below does not move with it: the report duty belongs to the LLC, not to the agent.

Duty calendar

Annual report license tax — due the 1st of your anniversary month — $60/yr minimum.

Every cell is marked “anniv”: this state’s duty is keyed to your own anniversary month, not to a fixed calendar month — the month your LLC was formed is the month the tax falls due, every year.

The recurring duty is the line that decides what Wyoming costs you in year three, not just year one. The license tax is the greater of $60 or $0.0002 multiplied by the value of the assets your LLC holds in Wyoming. Read that formula the way a non-resident should: if your company holds no property, equipment or inventory inside Wyoming — the usual case for a founder abroad running an online business — there is nothing for the variable part to bite on, and the $60 minimum is the whole duty, priced into the five-year table on this sheet at $60 a year. If you later place real assets in Wyoming, the tax is recalculated on that base; the duty is small because the base, for most readers of this sheet, is zero.

If it is late. The annual report is due on the first day of your anniversary month, and the Secretary of State treats an unfiled report as a standing problem rather than a shrug: an LLC that lets the report lapse can be administratively dissolved, and a dissolved LLC has to be reinstated — a second process, with its own filings — before it can act as a company again. For a founder several time zones away, the practical risk is not the $60; it is discovering the lapse when a bank or a processor asks for a certificate of good standing you no longer have. The compliance calendar in the membership exists for this line.

If the duty is missed altogether. Continued non-filing ends in administrative dissolution and the loss of the exclusive protection of the entity's name — the name becomes available to other filers while the company is dissolved. The company does not quietly pause; it stops existing as a Wyoming entity until it is reinstated, and contracts, accounts and processor relationships built on it are exposed in the meantime. This is the cheapest duty in the Atlas to keep and one of the silliest to lose a company over.

Cost of ownership

Membership $399/yr — year one includes formation, agent year one and EIN — + state fee at cost; renewal $399/yr buys agent renewal, the annual state filing service and the compliance calendar; state duty annualised from the verified figure on this sheet.
Horizon	Total paid	What it contains
Year 1	$499	$399 first-year membership + $100 state fee; formation, agent year 1 and EIN included
By end of year 2	$958	Year 1 + $399 membership renewal + $60 state duty
By end of year 5	$2,335	Year 1 + four renewals + four years of state duty

Compare that five-year figure, not the formation fee, against any other state you are considering — the compare tray in the Atlas does it side by side for up to three states. A state that is $100 cheaper to form and $300 a year heavier to keep is the expensive state.

Where Wyoming sits in this Atlas: 27th of 51 by formation fee ($100), and 30th by the five-year cost of ownership ($2,335). The year-one total of $499 is the $399 first-year membership with the state fee passed through at cost; after that, the meter runs at the $399 yearly membership renewal plus the state duty of $60 a year. The state duty itself makes up 10.3% of the five-year total; the rest is the membership — the first year and its renewals. That sits above the Atlas median five-year cost of $2,295 — by forty dollars, which is the honest version of the Wyoming story: the state is genuinely cheap to keep, and the membership, not Cheyenne, is most of what you pay. Judged on five years instead of filing day, Wyoming is a mid-table state to keep with a bottom-quartile duty — and that longer view is the one a non-resident owner actually lives with.

Non-resident specifics in Wyoming

Wyoming's recurring state cost for a domestic LLC is the duty on this sheet — Annual report license tax — due the 1st of your anniversary month — $60/yr minimum. Two cautions decide whether that stays the whole story. First, tax follows activity, not paperwork: if your customers, property or people are in another state, that state can require foreign qualification there and tax the activity there, whatever this sheet says. Second, an LLC is a state-law shell around a federal tax position: a foreign-owned single-member LLC is disregarded for federal income tax by default, which is exactly the status that carries the Form 5472 duty described in the non-resident section below — the state choice does not change it.

The federal layer, which no state choice removes. A single-member LLC owned by a non-resident is, by default, a disregarded entity for US federal income tax — and since 2017 that status carries an annual information duty: Form 5472 attached to a pro-forma Form 1120, due each year the LLC exists, reporting reportable transactions with its foreign owner (funding the company counts). The penalty for a missing or late Form 5472 starts at $25,000. Multi-member LLCs are taxed as partnerships by default and file Form 1065, with their own withholding questions when US-source income reaches foreign partners. None of this is a reason not to form; all of it is a reason to form with the calendar already drawn. The EIN guide on this site walks the Form SS-4 route for founders with no SSN or ITIN — the route this brand covers as part of year one, filing on paper with “foreign” written where a US tax number would go — plus the CP 575 you receive, and the 5472 duty in full.

Address and banking reality. Your Wyoming LLC's address on the state record is its registered office — the agent's address — which is a service address, not your trading address, and should never be sold to you as one. Banks and payment processors will ask for the beneficial owner's foreign address and passport-grade identification, and many will ask why the company sits in Wyoming; “my operations and customers are there” is an answer, a fee table is not. Form where the answer is true.

Plot my route — the 5-question diagnostic Compare Wyoming in the Atlas

Sources: formation fee and duty verified against official state sources — Wyoming Secretary of State, Business Division: https://sos.wyo.gov/Business/docs/BusinessFees.pdf (SOS Business Fees schedule) · fees and duties verified 2026-11-07. Federal figures (Form 5472 penalty) per IRS instructions for Form 5472.